Prints: works from the Symbolica archive, at the size their masters carry

The Major Arcana, on one sheet

Twenty two cards, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith and published in 1909, in order from the Fool at nought to the World at twenty one. The sheet is 594 by 683 mm at 300 ppi. Every card sits in a cell the size of the smallest scan in the set, so each one is reduced into it and none is scaled up, which is the same promise the wall above makes: nothing is enlarged to reach a size.

Twenty two will not fill a grid six across, so the sheet opens and closes face down. The first cell and the last carry the deck's own reverse, the roses and lilies pattern the 1909 printing is named after by the people who collect it. That one is reproduced from a modern printing of the pattern rather than scanned off a 1909 card, and it sits at the size its own file carries, which is smaller than the cell, because nothing here is enlarged either.

A single card carries 163 mm on its long edge, which is postcard scale. That is why the cards are not offered separately. The sheet is larger than any card in it because its size comes from the grid rather than from the scan.

The reason to print the set rather than a card is that the Major Arcana were issued together and read as a sequence. Laid out in order the twenty two are one argument, not twenty two pictures, and every card on this sheet has its own entry in the archive with its symbols marked and its readings quoted to the book they came from.

Pamela Colman Smith, 1909. Public domain. The twenty two entries. Prints are not on sale yet; the card on the wall above says when.

The Tree of Ten Names

Athanasius Kircher had the Tree of the Sephiroth engraved as a diagram for the second volume of his Oedipus Aegyptiacus in 1653: ten circles joined by twenty two channels, with the horizon of eternity above the crown. This is that diagram redrawn entire, at 500 by 700 mm.

Everything on it is off the plate. The ten divine names in the middle of the circles, the ten Sephiroth repeated around every ring clockwise from three o'clock, the Latin Kircher writes along each channel, the four boxes in the margins, and the thing most charts of the Tree quietly leave out: the plate numbers all twenty two channels and sets a Hebrew letter on each, in plain alphabetical order, Aleph on the first and Tau on the twenty second. That is on the copper, not supplied by anyone since.

What is ours is the paper, the ink, the gold and the typefaces, and the decision to leave his furniture out: the tablets of the law, the shewbread table, the seven branched lamp and the two altars. No cards are hung on it, and none will be. The reading says why.

After the plate engraved by Petrus Miotte, Rome 1653, read at Heidelberg. The reading · The plate in the archive.